Back to the House: Becoming a Man in the First Palestinian Intifada

13

Back to the HouseBecoming a Man in the First Palestinian Intifada1

Gustavo Baptista Barbosa2

There is no such a thing as society.

There are individual men and women

and there are families.

Margaret Thatcher

Madness in great ones

must not unwatched go.

William Shakespeare

Introduction

Everything seemed ready for the spectacle. Even the notoriously unpredict-

able Berlin weather decided to contribute and framed the recently and lav-

ishly refurbished stadium with only occasional pinkish clouds. The match

was already well into extra time and it appeared highly probable that, after

all, the World Cup 2006 would be decided by penalties. And then it all hap-

pened: presumably reacting to a “Yo-Mama” kind of provocation by the an-

noying Italian player Materazzi, the French Zidane first walked away, reflect-

ed and – the hell with the laurels – decided a proper reaction was mandatory:

he came back and butted his head directly against Materazzi’s chest, the geste

that would cost him the red card and his definitive departure from the tour-

nament. Three days after the incident, the following was all Zidane provided

by way of explanation to an avid multitude of journalists:

— I am a man.

1 This article is a slightly modified version of my final dissertation submitted to the MSc in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2006. I thank the Alban Programme of the European Union for having financed my MSc. I also thank VIBRANT’s anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous version of this paper. Responsibility for views expressed here is obviously mine.

2 PhD Candidate at the Department of Anthropology - London School of Economics and Political Science.

14 vibrant v.5 n.2 p. 13 – 44 gustavo barbosa

***

The Abu-Ghraib affair began well before the adoption of the opprobrious

technique of interrogation of its inmates. Disappointed by the meagre results

produced by the questioning of Iraqi detainees, the U.S. Secretary of Defense

Donald Rumsfeld decided that the secrecy that had been safeguarding the

hunt for Al-Qaeda members would be expanded to also cover inquires con-

ducted inside prisons. In practice, this meant that, in disregard for the rights

conferred on prisoners of war under the Geneva conventions, a green light

was granted to the garrison to submit inmates to physical abuse and sexual

humiliation in order to generate intelligence data. It was expected that detain-

ees, menaced with the potential release to their families and neighbours of

photos depicting them naked, submitting to a smiling female reservist or ter-

rified by a barking dog, would agree to co-operate with American intelligence

services after being freed and reinserted into their original communities.

Such an expectation – which short-circuited upon the publishing of

photos by the press and the uproar of indignation and solidarity from inter-

national and local communities that ensued – was informed by the work of

Princeton and Columbia cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai. Patai’s book,

The Arab Mind, first published in 1973, portrays Arabs as especially vulnera-

ble to sexual humiliation and, according to one scholar interviewed by New

Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, became “the bible of the neocons on Arab

behavior”. Its posthumous 2002 edition was prefaced by a retired Army colo-

nel, who recommended the material on the basis that it illuminated “the mo-

dal personality traits that made [the 9/11 hijackers] susceptible to engaging

in terrorist actions” (cited in Starrett 2004: 2). Patai reserves a whole 25-pa-

ge chapter to demonstrate how sex has supposedly become taboo for Arabs,

inescapably vested with repression and shame. In that chapter, he states:

“The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of women […] and all other minute

rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women have the effect

of making sex a primal preoccupation in the Arab world. […] [All] expressions

of sexuality […] [are] never given any publicity. These are private affairs and re-

main in private”. (cited in Hersh 2004: 11)

***

I could very well dwell on Zidane’s Algerian roots and propose that the two

events depicted above constitute mere variations on a single theme. Both

15back to the house

supposedly serve as illustrations of Arabs’ unavoidable entrapment by the

all-too-infamous pair of honour and shame. A fairly large literature has been

produced along these lines: an Arab man cannot allow himself to lose face in

public (as if this were an option for any of us); he needs to protect his hon-

our, inextricably linked to the behaviour of his female kin. Were I to maintain

this concept, I would merely be giving my own humble contribution to the

immemorial and on-going process of exoticization of Arab societies. Yet, if

there is one thing that we definitely do not need, it is another Orientalism.

I propose to take a different route and, playing the first vignette against

the second, suggest that the Abu Ghraib example simply serves as a defi-

nite illustration of anthropology’s proverbially uneasy relationship with co-

lonialism, including its newest versions. For what Zidane’s claim invites us

to consider is the image of a man whose very personhood is complexly in-

formed by various social links – an image that the occasionally very opaque

and fully gendered shame-honour3 stereotype does not always seem able to

account for.

One of the reasons for the frustration of American intelligence’s expec-

tations in the Abu Ghraib affair is that it was informed by an unequivocal-

ly crude anthropology; besides, no aura of scientism could render the impe-

rial project more palatable. Patai’s questionable “masterpiece” simply reifies

worn-out stereotypes of Arab societies. It cannot account for the upheaval

of indignation on the part of local communities upon the publishing of the

photos, for it seems to expect that only men strive to protect their honour,4

failing to grasp how both male and female relatives of the inmates would voci-

ferously react against the assault on one of their kin – understandably enou-

gh for here (as everywhere, I suspect) their very personhood was informed by

relationships with significant others. Moreover, Patai’s book takes for gran-

ted a decisive public-private division, forcing men to promenade almost ex-

clusively in a public sphere, hardly willing to pay attention to the kind of in-

ter-gender interaction that necessarily goes on inside households.

3 It would be interesting to investigate how the shame-honour pair relates to the one that will be oc-cupying us in the coming pages, public-private. Unfortunately, I do not have the space here to develop that thread. My belief is that the honour-shame pair is more part of the problem than of the explana-tion, for it raises more questions than it answers.

4 Dubisch (1995) states that, in her fieldwork, no informant ever characterized honour as a male pre-rogative. Wikan (1984), in turn, categorises honour as “experience-distant”.


It is precisely the facile dichotomy of public-private – with its eventual

conflation with the yet more infamous male-female or political-apolitical di-

visions – that will be my target in this paper. First, I plan to indicate the par-

ticular role the dichotomy played in the history of European political thou-

ght and its corresponding links to a specific political-economic setting. Its

unavoidable gender bias – since, from the very beginning, contract theo-

rists have erected a philosophy suitable for a male, propertied (and probably

white) setting – remained intact when this “entrenched dichotomy” gained a

new face in the writings of mid-20th century anthropologists and early femi-

nists and started being depicted as political jural-domestic or public-domes-

tic. Understandably, later feminist anthropologists, as I will show, reacted to

this gender bias and disputed the very validity of the dichotomy. When we

head east, in a subsequent section of this study, I will register how feminist

anthropologists conducting fieldwork in Arab societies also contested the

conflation of the dichotomy with male-female and political-apolitical: wo-

men’s worlds could indeed become very political and subversively critical, be

it through poetry, weaving or possession. Ironically enough, though, one voi-

ce ends up muted in some of these latter studies: men’s. As a matter of fact,

even recent performative theory tends to focus on men’s actions in public,

perhaps because that is what anthropologists could effectively have access to.

Nevertheless, recognising the methodological difficulty of access cannot jus-

tify pretending that such a presentation of men’s public performances is the

whole story. My argument is that it is not enough to pay attention to men’s or

women’s conduct in public: a micro-sociology of the family is not only man-

datory, but also urgent.

We will then be in a position to present our case-test: that of becoming a

man in the context of the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1992). The gendering

of young men in that specific context cannot usefully be explained within the

frame of the public-domestic dichotomy. The borders of public-domestic be-

come blurred and all one can say – which may not be much – is that an event

is happening inside or outside the house: the depiction of such events as pu-

blic or domestic normally entails unwelcome gender and political biases,

which seem completely out of place in this specific situation (and in other

ones as well). The next step will be to show that a concept of the polity not

based on the public-domestic dichotomy is informed by different notions of

personhood, not necessarily vitiated by the ideological device of the “isolated

17back to the house

individual”. Different polities opt to place emphasis on different concepts of

personhood and it takes a particular frame of mind to believe in the allegory

of individual men and women and isolated families, necessary for the imple-

mentation of a specific set of deconstructionist policies that resulted in the

dismissal of the welfare state in certain parts of the world, as the conclusion

of this essay suggests.

Public-private: an entrenched dichotomy

Given the elongated persistence of the public-private dichotomy over several

centuries of the history of Western philosophical thought, it may not be sur-

prising that each of its components has assumed several meanings through

time. Thus, a cursory investigation of the polysemic references for public-

private attests that, in certain instances, the dichotomy relates to spaces (e.g.

streets or houses); in another, to institutions (e.g. nations or families); while

in other situations to types of relationships (e.g. between different paterfa-

milias or between mothers and children). As might be expected, “public” has,

in different contexts, received manifold glosses, such as, inter alia, “govern-

ment”, “political society” and “social”. The same happens to “private”, which

has been variously interpreted as “domestic”, “family-like”, “household”, “in-

timate” and “apolitical” – with a bundle of concepts, such as “civil society”

or “community”, seeming to stand in between. What is definitely startling is

that, despite such variations, the same gender bias – that attaches “public” to

males and “private” to females – has remained more or less intact through-

out, though admittedly assuming different guises.

The conceptual divide that opposes public and private certainly pre-

dates the emergence of capitalism and bourgeois “democracies”. Hannah

Arendt (1958), for instance, identifies its presence already in ancient Greece

and it is with a certain gloomy nostalgia that she regrets its replacement by

an overarching “social” in recent totalitarian regimes. In the Middle Ages,

there seems to have existed more of a continuity between the two spheres

– which further confirms the artificiality and non-mandatory character of

the division. Philosophical defences of medieval monarchies thus proposed

a similitude between state and home, with patriarchal sires busy with the

“housekeeping” of their kingdoms (Collier, Maurer & Suárez-Navaz 1995). It

was with the dismissal of the ancien régime that the contrast between public


and private became fully one of kind, rather than just one of scale (Idem).

Families now started being understood as in opposition to states: accordin-

gly, they had to be policed and disciplined, through the proper deployment

of apparatus such as schooling and (private) philanthropy, which, by means

of its assistance-like and medical-hygienist mentality, would take charge of

eventual outcasts and emphasise the norm, without burdening the emer-

gent bourgeois states with the tasks of having to provide for deviant dro-

pouts (Donzelot 1979). Families ceased to be models for government and beca-

me instruments for it (Foucault 1978). Social contract theorists would aid this

process, supplying the philosophical underpinnings for the distinction of a

public sphere, established by common agreement between “men of reason”,

from a less-than-social private one, governed by the rules of God or nature

– in any case, beyond human control – with homes seeming to stand outsi-

de of or prior to human laws (Collier, Maurer & Suárez-Navaz 1995). It is not

difficult to guess what kind of gender prejudice would ensue, which would

blossom in the construction of the “domestic woman” in eighteenth and ni-

neteenth-century imagery (Jones 1990).

Macpherson (1962) cogently argues that the possessive individual who

serves as a basis for Hobbes’ and Locke’s contractualism is a direct reflection

of the market relations prevailing in seventeenth-century England. This an-

xious individual, condemned to a never-ceasing pursuit of his needs (a quest

that Sahlins (1996) prefers to ascribe to a structure of the long-run pervading

Western philosophy, the Adamic fall, which established that the plentiful pa-

radise is off-limits for us) is propertied. He is skin-bounded: he does not de-

pend on others; he exists autonomously of relationships with others; if no-

thing else, he owns his own person and his attributes. All he wants is to make

sure that his property rights – of himself and, especially in Locke, of his ma-

terial belongings – are duly observed and the solution to this – which allows

overcoming the permanent insecurity of the state of nature - is the contract.

Increasingly with Locke, our “men of reason” (and the use of the gendered

word here is fully purposeful), willing to subscribe to a contract good enou-

gh for them to take up their market activities unencumbered by royal privi-

leges, aristocratic monopolies and guild constraints, never for a moment thou-

ght that their propertyless dependents – servants, children and wives – should

have their own word and participate as equals in the social contract (Collier,

Maurer & Suárez-Navaz 1995). The irony of social contract theory is the irony

19back to the house

of the market: that whole parts of the population are simply not taken into ac-

count. In Macpherson’s words:

“The greatness of seventeenth-century liberalism was its assertion of the free

rational individual as the criterion of good society; its tragedy was that this very

assertion was necessarily a denial of individualism to half the nation” (1962: 262)

Included in this unpropertied half were of course women. This is Carol

Peteman’s (1988) line of reasoning, when she presents the “sexual contract” as

the “repressed dimension” of the social contract. Those that, following Locke,

did not want to submit to a self-perpetuating authority, not liable to the ma-

jority consent, were at the same time advocates of preserving the patriarchy

unscathed in their homes. Thus, the social contract based on supposedly uni-

versal reason settled on the public sphere disguised another contract – mar-

riage – which preserved hierarchical relations between unequals in the pri-

vate domain. The private was thus established as the realm of exception and

difference and the gender underpinnings of such a depiction would produce

effects well beyond the seventeenth century.5

This gender complex – the universality of which is far from unquestio-

nable, as feminist scholars have recently been eager to argue (Rosaldo 1980;

Yanagizako & Collier 1987; Ortner 1996) - has nevertheless found its way to the

pages of anthropology, when the public-private dichotomy was transported

to the confines of this minor inheritor of the intellectual tradition I have been

portraying here. Fortes, for instance, proposed, in his mid-20th-century stu-

dies of African societies, an analytical differentiation between filiation and

descent. The latter refers to the relation between ego and an ancestor, media-

ted by a parent and, as advocated by Fortes, it needs to be distinguished from

filiation – the relation deriving from the natural fact of being a child to a pa-

rent (actually, in his perspective, mostly to a mother). Descent was fully po-

litical – a phenomenon of the political-jural domain, regulated by “external”

and “public” sanctions -, whereas filiation, centring around the mother-child

dyad, pertained to the domestic sphere, characterised by the “private”, “mo-

ral” and “affective” norms of altruism linking kinsmen (Holy 1996). Reflecting

5 A potentially revelatory exercise would be to compare the gender biases of authors that inform the Western tradition of juridical thought – such as Pufendorf (1673), Kant (1785) and Hegel (1821) – to those eventually present in the works of authors that inform other traditions – for instance, Nasir ad-Din Tusi (1232).


the designs of the British colonial enterprise – and, one imagines, the gui-

ding principles of its financing agencies - anthropologists working within

the structural-functionalist tradition busied themselves with attempts to

explain the political functioning of the “societies without states” of Africa.

The consequence was that disproportionate attention was given to the poli-

tical-jural dimension of kin relationships, whereas domestic arrangements,

where emotions were thought to be lived and women enclosed, were taken

to be universally constant and almost totally ignored or at most considered

more appropriate for psychological rather than sociological investigation.

Moreover, while filiation cannot provide a transparent structuring principle

for the establishment of clearly bounded and non-overlapping segments – for

ego, from this perspective, is simultaneously a member of various groups –

the same does not happen with descent: Fortes and his disciples were happy

to study the intricacies of unilineal descent groups and British colonisers we-

re properly provided with chiefs of bounded segments, to whom they could

talk.6 Besides artificially seizing upon unilineal descent as the one aspect of

social life that should be given attention to – eventually inflating its impor-

tance far beyond what on-going social processes could justify – structural-

functionalist anthropologists contributed to the endurance of the gender

biases imbued into the analytical categories they adopted, such as “political-

jural” and “domestic”. The fact that such gender preconceptions might possi-

bly be alien to the societies under scrutiny was not even considered.

The seeming “naturalness” of gender hierarchies was denounced by fe-

minist scholars from the 1970s onwards and the fully cultural grounding of

gender asymmetries was exposed. Several of the papers reunited in the in-

fluential volume “Woman, Culture and Society” (Rosaldo & Lamphere 1974)

proceeded along those lines. In one of those papers, Rosaldo (1974) suggested

6 Native social scientists working in the developing world have also come up with dichotomies simi-lar to the ones problematized here. A case in mind is DaMatta’s (1984) explanations of Brazil based on the oppositions between the street (a rua) and the home (a casa), the individual and the person and, fi-nally, the sub- and the super-citizen. While this may be sufficient an indication that the tendency to reason along dichotomous pairs is not solely characteristic of the discourse produced in and by the co-lonial powers, I still consider it necessary to exert proper methodological caution prior to the hasty uti-lisation of such oppositions in different places. Sometimes the dichotomies do not function smoothly when transplanted to various latitudes and the borders between the two poles of the oppositions be-come blurred. Eventually, as argued below, the “combination” found in several societies between the two poles of the dichotomies is judged negatively, as a failed attempt to achieve “modernity”, as if a golden standard existed as to what it means to be “modern”.

21back to the house

that a universal opposition between “public” and “domestic” served to orga-

nise gender hierarchies everywhere. Women, confined to the domestic do-

main due to their specialised role in the reproduction of the human species,

were denied authority and prestige, prerogatives of men who paraded in the

public sphere. While such studies did play an important role in unveiling the

hardly-admitted gender prejudices of previous approaches – in reality, one

of the side-effects of the fact that, in “the palpably androcentric discipline

of anthropology” (Comaroff 1987: 54), fieldwork until then had chiefly been

conducted by male ethnographers with male informants – feminist scho-

larship still appeared to accept the same terms in which the debate was cast,

orbiting, thus, within the same semantic field. If, understandably, feminist

anthropologists did not want to view politics “as a male pastime” (Collier

1974: 89), part of this scholarship nevertheless, and somewhat ironically,

continued to be mesmerised by the public sphere (e.g. Sanday 1974). A sharp

public-private divide tended, therefore, to be taken for granted: studies at

the most limited consideration to how variations in the integration between

“public” and “domestic” would impact on women’s status (Sacks 1974). Only

scant attention ended up being reserved, at least at this first moment, to the

myriad ways in which men and women effectively interacted inside the fami-

lies, which remained, to a large extent, concealed.

Where have women been hiding?

Rosaldo herself recognized, in a later paper (1980), some of the pitfalls of her

1974 article on the public-domestic division. Even though stating that she

still thought that “in probing universal questions, domestic-public […] [was]

as telling as any explanation yet put forth” (399), she realized that the oppo-

sition took for granted too much about how gender effectively worked and,

in that sense, ceased to be illuminating but started instead having troubling

analytical consequences. Rosaldo now came to appreciate that she had been

pursuing “something of a ghost” (401) and that the domestic-public divide

relied on an essentialist view of what women were, due to their roles in giv-

ing birth and rearing children. Moreover, anticipating the recognition by lat-

er works of the inescapable interaction between kinship and gender – actu-

ally, mutually constituted disciplines, as Yanagizako and Collier (1987) argued

– Rosaldo admitted a link between her own reasoning on gender in the 1974


piece and Fortes’ discussions about kinship and the domestic-politico-jural

domains. Both depictions were unwitting heirs of a certain Victorian ideol-

ogy – sensed Rosaldo - which cast the sexes in a dichotomous light, as if a dif-

ference necessarily needed to mean an opposition or the creation of a hierar-

chy. Such an ideology restricted women to the “safe havens of homes”, while

men were forced out, to act as breadwinners in a heartless public sphere,

where the harsh competition of the market relations of capitalism prevailed.

As a matter of fact, public-domestic and political jural-domestic – as well as

this other over-arching dichotomy, nature-culture – seem to be just transfor-

mations of one another, to use Ortner’s and Whitehead’s (1981) felicitous ex-

pression. All have the effect of “flatten[ing] dynamic transformations into

static structural sameness” (Yanagizako & Collier 1987: 18).

In a general review of the literature on domestic units, Yanagizako (1979)

chooses Fortes’ contrast between the domestic and the political-jural as one

of her targets. She convincingly demonstrates how it depends on normative

premises of what such realms should be like, the former based on prescrip-

tive altruism – which supposedly belongs within the home – and the latter

subjected to external rules, represented by contracts, law and force. Vitiated,

from the very beginning, by the difficulties of defining precisely what the

domestic really was (a point I develop below), while, simultaneously, kee-

ping largely blind to the conflicts occurring inside homes, which should

reveal their fully political nature, Fortes’ distinction also implies a hierar-

chy, due to our particular and possibly culturally-specific mindset that re-

putes an external sphere as always encompassing an internal one. Following

that thread, anthropology literally became “the study of man embracing wo-

man” (Malinowski cited in Moore 1988) and a whole set of issues in terms of

the representation of women followed. As Moore aptly remarks, sexism can-

not be overcome by the simple accretion of a woman’s point of view to our

studies. The “add-women-and-stir method” (Boxer, cited in Moore 1988: 3)

runs the risk of reproducing androcentrism in inverted form (Yanagizako &

Collier 1987: 26). Besides, the idea that only a woman can comprehend ano-

ther woman – as if some kind of “universal female” actually existed, inde-

pendent of variables such as class, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation,

and a common sympathy between a female informant and a female ethno-

grapher would immediately sparkle, in spite of the power relations charac-

teristic of the ethnographic encounter – casts doubt on the very premises of

23back to the house

anthropology. If it takes one to understand one, the whole comparative en-

deavour at the core of our discipline is undermined (Shapiro cited in Moore

1988: 5). Thus, the challenge facing an anthropology of gender is not just that

of incorporating “women’s points of view” but that of learning to ask the

proper questions and searching for the appropriate representations of wo-

men’s and men’s lives, without being encumbered by a priori interpretive fra-

meworks, such as that represented by the domestic political-jural dichotomy.

The problem of the structural domains has therefore to be “rethought sui gen-

deris”, as Comaroff (1987) advocates. His diagnosis of the debates surrounding

the divide is forceful:

“Critics of the classical concept of the domestic and political-jural fall along

a continuum: those who reconsider the substance and the functions of the

domains, without questioning their sociological reality or the relationship

between them; those who acknowledge the existence of these domains, but

stress the variability of their interconnection; and those who view their emer-

gence as a historically specific phenomenon, often arising from transforma-

tions in political economy, and who treat them as problematic forms and ideo-

logical representations” (1987: 57)

At the heart of the problems created by the dichotomy lies a particularly

obscure and circular definition of the domestic. Whatever women do is ta-

ken to be domestic and domestic will be whatever women do (Yanagizako &

Collier 1987; Harris 1981). The mother-child dyad assumes, as expected, a cen-

tral position in such a depiction and, because women everywhere are the ones

who give birth, this concept of the domestic introduces an unwarranted as-

sumption of universalism: all around the world, women now had to hide in

the house to gestate babies and look after them. Furthermore, because what

is thought of as universal tends to be considered natural, the mother-child

dyad and families become naturalized – as if everywhere families were the sa-

me and as if motherhood would always be essential for the definition of wo-

manhood cross-culturally. The adepts of a strict domestic-public divide ne-

ver tackle such complicated issues as to what extent families and households

coincide and whether families at all times have to be identified with a taken-

for-granted ubiquitous head of household (Harris 1981). Naturalized – and na-

ture normally serves as an ideological instrument for the justification of hie-

rarchies and subordination (Idem) – families are represented as closed units:


a politicized view of them (Hart 1992), including an analysis of what is going

on inside – precisely what a micro-sociology of the family might unveil - is a

priori discarded.

In his revealing ethnography of the Tshidi, Comaroff (1987) ingenious-

ly demonstrates how, even though the distinction public-domestic was mo-

re accentuated in periods of hierarchical centralization of the social field,

the very contours of the divide were intrinsically fluid and assumed diffe-

rent guises in the three instances of centralization he analyses: the pre-colo-

nial, the colonial and neo-colonial (e.g., under the South African state) and

the industrial capitalist. His conclusion is that a clear-cut public-domestic

division, which is unchanging over time, simply does not hold. He exposes

the full historicity of the shifting features households, as well as the inter-

relation between them, showed through time, according to varying situa-

tions. “Domestic relations” – states Comaroff – “are always affected by the

[changing] exigencies of political economy, just as wider political and econo-

mic structures are predicated on the division of labour and the production

of value within the household” (83). He argues that his analysis concurs with

Nelson’s (1974) who, when evaluating anthropological studies of the Middle

East, asserts that the conflation of the public with the political and the priva-

te with the domestic is unsustainable. Her point is that, in the ethnography

of the Middle East, the contrast between the realms is an objectionable im-

position of categories produced by Western social science. Let us move east,

then, to investigate what precisely she means.

Heading east, following the lead of women

It is almost a truism that the relation between the public and the domestic

changes over time and space and that the level of overlap or segregation be-

tween these domains fluctuates ceaselessly. Yet tautologies do not always

seem to be obvious and analysts have tended to reify each of these spheres in-

to static sameness and, by “heuristic fiat” (Comaroff 1987: 56), have carved up

a somewhat more untidy social reality. In the case of scholars working with

the Middle East, the imposition of a clear-cut distinction between public and

domestic has produced yet another Orientalism: lived experiences were “dis-

lodged by a dictionary definition” (Said 1978: 155), essentializing, orientaliz-

ing and generalizing the Orient on the move, through a dichotomy that had

25back to the house

more meaning to Western scholars than to the realities purportedly being

portrayed. Due to the alleged sexual insatiability of Arabs, women had to ob-

serve modesty and be kept veiled and condoned off in a theoretically apoliti-

cal domestic sphere. Their exoticization was the price to be paid to maintain

the boundaries between public and domestic, and Western colonizers were ac-

cordingly provided with a reality that they could grasp, cope with and submit.7

Based on her appraisal of ethnographies of the Middle East, Nelson (1974)

is convinced of the fragile foundations for the association of women with the

domestic, private and informal and men with the public, political and for-

mal. According to her, it is a very narrow definition, inspired by Radcliffe-

Brown, of the political as the maintenance or establishment of social order

within a territory through coercive authority, which blinds students to the

fully political character of women’s purposive action in articulating the re-

lationship between the so-called domestic and public. “Private” and “politi-

cal” –Nelson believes – are not useful metaphors to describe the domestic and

the public respectively and data from the Middle East precisely shows women

exercising public power when transacting relationships between households.

In probing why segmentary theory with its focus on men became a zo-

ne of prestige in the anthropological literature of the Arab world in the 1970s

and 1980s, contributing to consolidating the image of Arabs as divisive and

violent, Abu-Lughod (1989) speculates that this is due to the association of

men with politics in Western societies. Throughout the 1980s, anthropologists

working with sexuality and gender confronted such a view and produced an

alternative emphasis on women’s worlds, establishing a new zone of presti-

ge, which Abu-Lughod provocatively calls the harem, with all its Orientalist

evocations. Works along these lines challenged depictions of Arab women

as compliant and futile and insisted on their multi-layered and complex

7 In this sense, feminism – in spite of all its good intentions – may have contributed to the Orientalist project. Mahmood (2001, 2005) persuasively exposes the Western parochial roots of some of the con-cepts adopted by feminist theory, such as agency, which leads yet again to silencing Arab women and to scholars seeing it as their task to speak for them. Defining agency only as resistance to domination – as feminists sometimes do - contributes to denying it to women who accept culturally specific relations of subordination, such as participants of the mosque revivalist movement Mahmood studies. These wom-en do not react to male domination, but learn to accept subordination in their search to attain a pious life. Agency here is taken to mean the capacity for action within historically specific relations of subor-dination. Abu-Lughod (1998), for her part, disquietingly identifies some commonalities between femi-nism and Islamism in Egypt, in the selective acceptance or repudiation of images of the “Western wom-an”, in order to create a vision of modernity, in the former case, or to invent a tradition, in the latter.


relations with each other, their offspring, their relatives and husbands.

Women now left home and could engage in active politicking and influence

decision making, through upholding or releasing to their husbands and rela-

tives information collected in other households, participating in marriage ar-

rangements, visiting friends and relatives and gossiping.

Women’s worlds are not only wholly political, but also eventually utter-

ly subversive, as studies inspired by performative theory illustrate. Through

weaving, Messick’s (1987) female informants from Azrou in North Africa ela-

borated a “subordinate discourse”, which portrayed them as the exclusive

agents who bring life into the world, functioning thus as an alternative to

the official androcentric ideology. Bedouin Awad ‘Ali women, for their part,

while submitting to moral canons through their strict observance of practi-

ces of modesty, rebelliously defied such codes in their poetry (Abu-Lughod

1986, 1990). Through Zar possession, Hofriyati women from Southern Sudan

go even farther (Boddy 1988, 1989). Zairan spirits enable the possessed women

to look at their culturally over-determined world – where their own selfhood

is very much bounded by their role in human reproduction – from a non-

Hofriyati perspective. That is why Boddy describes Zar possession as a “folk”

therapy: through trance, women step outside of the normative content and

constraints of their world and may see the sources of their suffering as less

naturalized and less unquestionable.

Of course, such an intellectual move, as any other, is not devoid of dif-

ficulties. Morris (1995) recommends caution to avoid romanticising all the-

se performative acts and the hasty equation of the criticism of the status

quo they entail with active resistance. She regards it as more appropriate to

speak of ritual reversal, liminality or anti-structure, rather than subversive

confrontation. Even segregation, which beforehand was considered as seve-

rely curtailing women’s movements, has tended to be recast in a new light by

these recent works, as facilitating an all-female exchange of information in

a realm from which men are banned. Furthermore, as Abu-Lughod (1989) lu-

cidly observes, the pitfall to avoid is to become entrapped by the harem: one

needs to move beyond it. Through its deconstruction, the ethnographer, even

when focusing on women’s worlds, should be able to acknowledge their dia-

lectical relationships with men’s. The danger to be overcome is that, after

all this effort to problematize the automatic conflation of political jural-do-

mestic with political-apolitical and male-female, all we come up with is the

27back to the house

provision of an all-female audience and public to other women. Awad ‘Ali

poetry, Azrou weaving, Zar possession and other performances by women

should encounter some kind of echo in men’s worlds. In her finely elabora-

ted ethnography of Zabidi elite families in Yemen, Meneley (1996) faces this

difficulty and cogently indicates the faux pas of characterizing reciprocal vi-

sits by women as private and as producing repercussions only in the fema-

le’s world. These visits exhibit an agonistic feature and, because they provide

opportunities for the display of hospitality and wealth, are instruments in a

“tournament of values”, in a dispute among families to conquer and preser-

ve public recognition. They are about the social standing of the households,

with their female and male members.

We continue to be haunted here by the public-private divide and the ana-

lyst needs to be careful not to be seized by it. If the studies examined under

this topic definitely reject the conflation of the public with men only, they re-

main timidly hesitant when it comes to disputing the characterization of the

domestic as a female world. It seems understandable that the age-old mesme-

rizing by the public is once again repeated here. Performances require specta-

tors and are public statements: the result is that studies of performative acts

end up paying almost exclusive attention to the public side of the dichoto-

my – an obstacle which, as we will see in the next section, confronts even mo-

re strongly the analysis of men’s worlds, partly as a consequence of fieldwork

conditions in segregated societies. But a lot remains to be said about what

goes on inside homes. Dubisch (1995) is rightly dismayed by the characteriza-

tion of women’s performances in rural Greece as private, such as participation

in pilgrimages or public displays of suffering – which has the surprising effect

of rendering suffering empowering, a point very relevant to my discussion be-

low. In the same sense, we should be even more disheartened with the descrip-

tion of men’s actions inside their homes as public. To avoid the contradiction,

analysts tend to consider men’s actions as necessarily public, opting to ignore

what the latter do in the “domestic”. Actually, as my Palestinian case will ho-

pefully show, the public-domestic dichotomy is simply out-of-place here.

And so, where did men go?

To avoid being ensnared by the harem, running the risk of reifying

walls to organise a strictly dichotomous world, the value-loaded domains of


which have serious consequences in terms of our views of gender,8 we have

to learn how to “traffick in men”, to make use of Gutmann’s (1997) thought-

provoking re-appropriation of the title of Gayle Rubin`s (1975) influential

article, which inaugurated a path of investigation for feminist anthropo-

logy. Thus, while ethnography has throughout its history involved mostly

men talking to men – producing a bias rightly criticized by feminist ana-

lysts - only recently have scholars within the discipline started paying atten-

tion to men as men, that is to how they act as “engendered and engendering

subjects”9 (Gutmann 1997: 385). As a matter of fact, there seems to be no le-

gitimate reason why gender studies should automatically be equated only

with women’s studies. That obviously does not mean that accounts of man-

hood should content themselves with representing some kind of a “men’s

turn” (Idem: 403) in gender inquiries. This would ignore the essential advan-

ces accomplished by feminist scholarship. As the feminists did before, the

literature on manhood must also overcome the “overly dichotomized [view

of the] world in which men […] [are] men and women […] [are] women, and

women contribute as little to ‘making’ men as men […] [do] to ‘making’ wo-

men” (Idem: 389). Relationships between men and women must be properly

positioned at the centre of our efforts – a standpoint that the focus solely on

rituals or performative acts in public eventually obliterates, as rightly detec-

ted by Gutmann:

“Whether women and men absent themselves from the others’ presence during

rituals [and eventually in performative acts] […], women and men do regularly

interact in other times, and they profoundly affect each others’ lives and iden-

tities. We must not confuse formal roles and definitions with daily lives” (401;

addition mine)

This is precisely the difficulty with Gilsenan’s (1996) depiction of the

8 Perhaps I should state very clearly that I am not negating here the existence of sex segregation, in varying degrees, in Middle Eastern societies; as a matter of fact, this would simply be implausible. I al-so fully recognize that certain phenomena happen inside the homes, while others occur outside. I have difficulties, though, as it is certainly clear by now, with the description of these domains as “public” or “domestic” or as “male-only” and “female-only” for that normally implies another value-loaded and in-famous dichotomy: political and apolitical.

9 In the case of the Middle East, initiatives along these lines (such as Ghoussob & Sinclair-Webb 2000 and Ouzgane 2006) are very few and recent, and eventually exhibit uneven results which, though laudable for their ground-breaking character, are still understandably of a very tentative nature.

29back to the house

lords of the Lebanese marches, the beys, and of their agents, the aghas, and

the local fellahin sharecroppers in Akkar, in the north of the country. While

Gilsenan compellingly shows the role narratives play in the construction

of violent political and economic relations between these men – and which

are decisive for their gendering – his analysis does not explore the way

women might affect the process. He is unapologetic about the fact. Yet

the question of women’s participation cannot easily be dismissed due to

the difficulty of access to them for a male ethnographer conducting field-

work in a segregated society. Justifications based on lack of access do not

amount to solving the problem.

Gilsenan draws heavily on Herzfeld’s (1985) landmark book on the “poe-

tics of manhood” in Glendi, Crete. For Glendiot men, the issue was not

just that of “being a good man”, but also of “being good at being a man”.

They had to exceed themselves and others in their “performative excellen-

ce” when playing cards, abducting women, dancing or stealing animals.

Moreover, deeds must be narrated and displayed in public by their perpe-

trators, to gain simasia (meaning). It is self-regard, eghoismos, as a social

and not individual value only, that drives men to the celebration of their

actions. Herzfeld’s is still very much an “anthropology of the spectacle”

– or so it seems to me - with men striving to excel each other when dan-

cing in the town square, playing cards in the coffee-houses or boasting of

their latest daring goat theft. One can feel his discomfort when, challen-

ged by Harris to discuss whether, in the sense he uses the word, a “poetics”

could also be applied to women, Herzfeld (1991) replies that women per-

form their lack of performance and, through their silence, creatively de-

form their submission. My question here is whether a “poetics” (of man

and womanhood) may also be performed in the humdrum routines of daily

life (or in the everyday suspension of it, as we shall soon see). Moreover, I

probe whether a “poetics” is necessarily so dependent on eghoismos, which,

in spite of being a social value, inevitably implies an individual carefully

trying to exert control of the situations in which his public persona is dis-

played. Can mothers, wives and sisters perform a “poetics of manhood”

for their (silent) sons, husbands and brothers – gendering them and beco-

ming themselves gendered in this process – in actions either house-based

or conducted inside homes?


Back to the house: public-private in crisis

As soon as Hala stepped out of the taxi that had brought her from her fa-

mily’s house to that of her groom’s, in a village in Ramallah, her new mo-

ther-in-law, Imm Zyiad, expressed her joy by breaking into piercing ululation

(zaghrude).10 11 Imm Zyiad was immediately censured by her husband: “Shu?!”

(“What?!) – he whispered to her adamantly, as if to mean “What the hell are

you doing?”. Realising that her attitude – which was precisely what she was

expected to do before the intifada - was not appropriate in the new hard times,

Imm Zyiad promptly interrupted the zaghrude. Other peculiarities also indica-

ted that Hala’s marriage would not be like the ones held before the intifada. The

bride had publicly requested the wedding contract not to include a marriage

payment (mahr). This was not only an indication of political commitment, at-

tending to an appeal from the United National Leadership of the Uprising –

which had urged the population to abstain from exorbitant mahr, so as not to

discriminate against the young men whose participation in the strike forces

had severely reduced their income. It was also a demonstration of Hala’s com-

mitment to feminist ideals, which characterised mahr payments as an unac-

ceptable commodification of women. Those involved in the preparation of

food for the wedding party, for their part, stressed how austere it would be: not

the lavish banquets of the times prior to the intifada and with only immediate

relatives as guests. “Not at all like old weddings” – they lamented.

***

The North American and European students taking part in the 1989 Bir Zeit

University’s International Summer Student Programme, in the West Bank,

began to be outspoken about their disappointment with some of the activi-

ties proposed to them. The Bir Zeit Programme was a public relations effort

by Palestinians to make their difficult lives under Israeli occupation known

to the world: the expectation was that, once students saw Palestinians’ living

10 The ethnographic data on Palestine of this section were collected from Jean-Klein’s work in the West Bank (2001, 2002). My rather selective use of Jean-Klein’s data in the present and the next sections and, in the case of the latter, also of Peteet’s (1994) does not do justice to either. Within the limits of this article, nevertheless, I can only afford to expose the portions of their findings relevant to the argument developed here. Readers interested in more nuanced ethnographic descriptions should check the works of those authors directly (Jean-Klein 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and Peteet 1994).

11 I use throughout this section the transliteration of Arabic adopted by Jean-Klein.

31back to the house

conditions, they would pressure their governments to pursue more active

Middle Eastern policies and to reconsider the accentuated Israeli bias some

of these policies betrayed. Students were getting impatient, though, with the

feeling that they were not being shown the whole story. Particularly when it

came to the activities of women’s committees, it seemed to them that those

organisations’ relations with and eventual submission to the male-dominated

and faction-ridden party politics – which, in their view, compromised a truly

liberating feminist agenda - were deliberately being hidden. When it became

public that some of the women describing the activities of their committees

were actually sisters of the male organisers and hosts of the Programme, stu-

dents became vocal about their suspicions and their questions nearly caused

confrontation. A German participant provoked her hosts: if the agenda of

women’s committees were subservient to the national liberation movement

and if they had only been allowed out of their houses to take part in an ef-

fort led by their male kin, were women not afraid that, once the struggle

was over, they would be forced back to their traditional roles in their fami-

lies? The members of women’s committees were stunned by the provoca-

tion, as if it simply had no meaning to them. The defiant tone of some of the

Programme’s participants only began to wane a few days later, when lectured

on the issue by a Palestinian scholar, who talked about alternative local femi-

nisms and compared factionalism to the party-pluralism of North American

and Western European democratic systems. It seemed that finally the stu-

dents were being taught in a language that they could understand.

***

The two sequences of events related above happened during the first

Palestinian intifada (1987-1992). Intifada, from the root n-f-d, meaning “to

shake off ” and “to recover” and one of the few Arabic words to have found its

way into 20th-century Western political vocabulary, describes the Palestinian

uprising against Israeli rule, which both confronted the occupiers and

sought to lay the foundations for an autonomous Palestinian society. Fuelled

by the harsh conditions of life under Israeli control, by burgeoning Israeli

settlements, by the virtual monopolisation of the Arab agenda then by the

Iran-Iraq war and the endless Lebanese crisis, by Washington’s resolute sup-

port to Tel-Aviv and the relative indifference of Arabs and the international


community, the intifada revealed the soaring sentiment among Palestinians

that they could count only on themselves to resist the occupation.12 One of the areas in which they could assert themselves was precisely that of the mean-ing of everyday processes, which became explicitly politicised.

That is what Jean-Klein’s (2001) illuminating ethnography shows. With

their capacity to manifest revolt through usual political channels severely

curtailed, due to fierce Israeli control, Palestinians infused everyday activities

– such as visiting, eating and drinking coffee together, celebrating marriages

(as Hala’s case shows) and preparing shopping lists – with political meaning.

Jean-Klein describes Palestinian practices during the first intifada as resul-

ting from a decision to suspend everyday life and not show any signs of joy,

for one should not try to forget the hardships of the Situation. Wedding cele-

brations, for instance, should be kept to a minimum in order not to display a

joy that current conditions did not justify.13 Shopping lists had to be reviewed in order to eliminate all Israeli products. House decorations and bodily ornamen-tation were exposed as futile preoccupations that the prevailing situation did not allow. The sahrat – all-night visits between families spent in care-free chit-

chat and game-playing – were limited to the early hours of the evening and

centred on political conversation. According to Jean-Klein:

“[A]lthough domestic oriented, […] [these practices were] not a covert form of

political action. […] [They] gave a public display of political commitment using

the space of everyday life as a site and language of public expression.” (2001: 106)

The attempt, the anthropologist maintains, was to preserve as a Palestinian

monopoly the capacity of assigning meaning to and presenting as self-autho-

red activities that were nevertheless brutally impacted by Israeli control. Under

the deprivation resulting from the occupation, Hala’s family would have faced

insurmountable obstacles to host a wedding-ceremony in the pre-intifada sty-

le. It made more sense for Palestinians, thus, to present the sobriety of the fes-

tivity as stemming from their own will not to be joyful nor to celebrate under

12 Mine is admittedly a sketchy presentation of the historical roots for the intifada, the only one I can afford within the limits of this paper. Those interested in more comprehensive accounts should check the books by Rigby (1991) or Lochman and Beinin (1989).

13 It seems significant that martyrs’ funerals were spoken of as “patriotic weddings” (a’ras wataniya) and, differently from ordinary marriages, constituted opportunities for large gatherings, during which women exploded in loud piercing ululation (Jean-Klein 2001).

33back to the house

the Situation. Instead of simply bowing to passive victimisation, Palestinians

in Jean-Klein’s account appear as also asserting the heroic position of agents

whose capacity of assigning meaning to their daily actions remained unsca-

thed. Thus, a mother whose son was imprisoned during an Israeli raid reacted

against the description of the incident as if the boy had been taken by the sol-

diers: “What do you mean, ‘They took him’? He went!” (Idem: 114).

Here, as with Gilsenan (1996) and Herzfeld (1985), talk is action and it is

through their utterances that people transform the ordeals they have to face

and infuse them with new meanings. We are in the presence of the illocutio-

nary force of performative acts (Austin 1975). It was through their utteran-

ces, for example, that mothers, wives and sisters made very clear the status

they wanted to dispense to the visits paid to their imprisoned sons, hus-

bands and brothers. “‘Ashan il-intifada!” (“For the intifada!”) – they exclaimed

(Jean-Klein 2003: 561) and this way the public and political character of the

visits was established beyond doubt, without prejudice of their familial and

domestic contours.

Jean-Klein (2003) also identifies “aesthetic and formal parallels” between

the socialities of the households and political committees, blurring once

again the boundaries between public and private. In both cases, full mem-

bers are distinguished from associates, on whom nevertheless they can count.

Formally reckoned agnatic kinship is therefore expanded in order to incorpo-

rate associates from the neighbourhood, friends or patrons and clients. In si-

milar fashion, associate friends (asdiqa) of committees supported the activities

of the fully enlisted participants of these latter groups. As might be expected,

gender, seniority and class distinctions decisively influenced relations insi-

de and between both households and committees. Finally, in both situations,

one finds what Jean-Klein names “subjects of combination”: individual sub-

jects or categories of persons who, unrealized if isolated, depend on on-going

relationships with significant others in order to achieve a “cross-subjective

enactment of the self [or of the relevant category of persons]” (Jean-Klein 2000:

102), a point we will come back to in our next section. Therefore, just as a mo-

ther’s or sister’s acts were essential for the very definition of the gendered per-

sonhood of her son or brother – as we shall soon see -, so the banat committee,

congregating single young women, or the niswan committee of older matrons,

conducted activities vital for the operation of the shebab (young men) strike

forces. Young women, for instance, provided first aid for shebab (often, their


brothers) who were hurt in action or secured safe alleys for escapes. Matrons

attempted to revert shebab’s (possibly, their own sons’) imprisonment, loudly

and publicly reproaching Israeli soldiers on the spot for wanting to incarcerate

what were, after all, just unarmed teenagers. There is effectively nothing sur-

prising in this continuity between families and political committees. Actors

involved in the two spheres – public and private, if I can still refer to them in

this way at this late juncture – were the same and there was no need for banat,

niswan or shebab to abandon and completely come out of the house to find their

ways into the committees and become politically active.14

That is precisely what the international students of the Summer

Programme at Bir Zeit University found hard to accept. They adopted more of

a position as “auditors” than that of simple witnesses to the intifada and we-

re judgemental towards what they observed in the women’s committees, re-

jecting it as yet another manifestation of the enduring traditional mixture of

kinship and politics, unacceptable to their “gold standard” of what politics

should be like, which demanded that public and private be kept apart (Jean-

Klein 2002).15 Reflecting on her Lebanese data, Joseph (1997) argues that the

mixing of public and private, or kinship and politics, which she detected in

her field, has been dysfunctionalised by Western scholarship, which reputes

it as some failed attempt to achieve modernity. Those who are “modern”, as

Latour (1993) reminds us, have never found it easy to live with hybrids, and

the merger of kinship and politics or of private and public seems precisely to

be the case. But then, Middle Easterners have never been modern. Nor, as a

matter of fact, have we.

Je est plusieurs autres: gender-making in crisis

Upon congregating the women of the neighbourhood in her humble sit-

ting room in a Palestinian camp, Imm Fadi summoned her teenage son and

14 Mahmood’s work with female participants of a revivalist Islamic movement in a Cairo mosque (2001), as well as Hirschkind’s study of Egyptian male listeners of audio-taped sermons (2001), point in the same direction, showing that “public” does not need to be irredeemably opposed to “private”. In both studies, the focus is on the processes of formation of “moral virtues” that are simultaneously “pu-blic” and “private” (and probably also “domestic”).

15 In her ethnography of Palestinians from Galilee, Kanaaneh (2002) shows how family planning and reproduction decisions acquire a political dimension, in yet another demonstration of the difficulty of establishing for good where the public-political ends and the domestic-private starts.

35back to the house

daughter to the presence of her guests.16 In a controlled manner, she re-

ported that both had been beaten by Israeli soldiers, allegedly for throwing

stones at them. The soldiers had used their batons and riffle butts and tar-

geted the children’s kidneys, arms and face. The boy was also shot in the side.

Imm Fadi requested her son to raise his t-shirt, so that the women could see

his scar. Quietly, the boy consented, while Imm Fadi went on describing the

abuses he had suffered. The audience eventually interjected:

— What kind of people are these? How can they do this to children?

***

One of the areas in which Palestinians strived to preserve their capacity to as-

sign their own meaning to their adversities was that of the beatings and tor-

ture young men had to endure when caught by the Israeli army. While Israeli

soldiers tried to make use of violence to exact submission, Palestinians in-

verted the meaning intended by the occupiers and, according to Peteet (1994),

transformed torture and imprisonment into a rite of passage into manhood.

We have here all the three phases Van Gennep (1908) and Turner (1969) iden-

tified in rites of passage: separation (less evident in the case of beatings con-

ducted in the alleys of the camps, but present, as the boy is momentarily re-

moved from the surrounding public, which tries to intervene), liminality

and re-aggregation. Moreover, the shebab who were tortured and did not give

away the names of their companions, are re-aggregated into their communi-

ties in a new standing: almost as fully-fledged men, on whom the communi-

ty can count upon to confront its problems. The reaching of the threshold of

full manhood - which normally would happen several years later, upon mar-

riage, the birth of a male son and the ageing of their own paterfamilias - is an-

ticipated, as 24-year-old Hussein found out, when, right on his first evening

home upon release from prison, he was called on to mediate a dispute in his

camp (Peteet 1994), normally a prerogative of older men.

Here, again, talk plays an important role. As Dubisch (1995) and

Serematakis (1991) discovered in rural Greece, verbal performances are not

only expressive, but transformative and creative as well: they may create gen-

der, for instance. When we compare the case analysed here with Herzfeld’s

16 This incident is reported by Peteet (1994).


(1985) and Gilsenan’s (1996) works, which also proceed along those lines, we

immediately detect a difference though. If in intifada-Palestine, a “poetics of

manhood” is creating and gendering men as in Greece and Lebanon, it is a

“poetics” nonetheless conducted by women - wives, sisters and, especially,

mothers – normally but not only in the space of their homes, the description

of which as “domestic”, “female-only” or “apolitical” simply is not adequate.

The exigencies of modesty and the secrecy surrounding the operations

in which they engaged, limited the shebab’s capacity to signify themselves;

they could not afford to go around celebrating and publicizing their glorious

deeds (Jean-Klein 2000). Their mothers, sisters and wives claimed the task

for themselves and it is the flow of words stemming from them that cross-

subjectively and relationally defined the gendered and moral personhood of

male heroes. In the process, the women themselves re-invented their gender:

not as submitting to the power of the paterfamilias, but as “mothers of the

Uprising” or as the sisters and wives of heroes.

If a new hegemonic discourse of masculinity is under construction in

this process – which erects shebab activities as iconic and representative of

manliness under the intifada – we should, nonetheless, not lose sight that,

in the same move, another image of masculinity – a newly subordinate one

(Cornwall & Lindisfarne 1994) - is perhaps humiliatingly being dislocated

to the margins: precisely that of the paterfamilias. Having had their capacity

to act as breadwinners harshly limited by the occupation and being looked

down on for what was considered to be their failure to protect their families

or uphold the very existence of Palestine, the paterfamilias never found a pro-

per role in the Uprising. Nevertheless, as every transformation always implies

reproduction (Sahlins 1981), it may be questioned whether the shebab were in

the process of affirming themselves as new paterfamilias. Some reports effec-

tively indicate that, upon their release from prisons, shebab returned home

and tried to control their sisters’ movements and dress habits (Peteet 1994).

Joseph’s ethnography of Lebanon similarly illustrates how the constitu-

ting of the self through “connectivity” or “relationality” genders brothers and

sisters (1994) and contributes to maintaining patriarchy (1993, 1999). She in-

dicates as well how a “relational” concept of personhood impacts on the or-

ganisation of the polity (1996).17 People expect to guarantee the exercise of

17 Dumont (1985) also proposes that different notions of personhood correspond to different social

37back to the house

their rights because of the relations and access they have to those in posi-

tions of power. I am not convinced that Palestinians are as unbounded as the

Lebanese described by Joseph. They are certainly not the cross-gender, com-

posite and divisible persons of the Melanesian type (Strathern 1988). I consi-

der, though, that the idea of bounded but permeable persons that Busby

(1997) uses to describe her informants from Marianad, in Southern India, is

useful when it comes to depicting the image of the Palestinians I am trying

to convey. It is not that Palestinians during the intifada were permeable to the

exchange of substances, as in India, but to the flow of words coming from

significant others. This is not so exotic after all – and definitely happens

among us as well. As can be expected, the valuing of this image of persons as

non-isolable has weighty political consequences – be it on the level of fami-

lies or on the level of states, nascent or otherwise.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that the public-private dichotomy – with its gender

biases – has a specific history in the Western hemisphere, which should in-

spire caution in scholars hastily trying to apply it elsewhere. In the case of

the Palestinian intifada, I have shown that the conflation of public-private

with political- domestic or male-female simply does not hold. Moreover, the

public-private contrast depends on a particular concept of personhood – the

isolable individual, who in public submits to the contract to protect his own

property and who can only find rest in the safety of the hearth. Neither the

organisation of the polity based on the public-private distinction nor the

concept of personhood that serves as basis for it are mandatory or natural.

Our Palestinian case demonstrates quite well that both polities and person-

hoods may assume alternative features. And this is so also among ourselves.

The definition of boundaries between public and private is a fully politi-

cal process. The domains thus established are later naturalized, so that they

appear unquestionable. Similarly political is the valuing, by various polities,

settings: in his work, the Western individual as a bearer of a unique identity is opposed to the concep-tion prevalent in holist India, where the person is enmeshed in the hierarchical ordering of caste groups. Carsten (2004), as argued below, makes the point that the emphasis on the “individual” by so-cial scientists working in Western settings may be the result of a biased methodology.


of different images of personhood – as isolable individuals, partible compo-

sites or bounded but permeable persons. I would only be proceeding with

an Orientalizing exercise if I were to propose that Palestinians are relational,

while we are individuals. Palestinians are individuals as much as we are rela-

tional – it is simply that, in different settings, certain dimensions and images

of personhood tend to be valued, to the detriment of others. Carsten (2004)

indicates that, since Mauss’ (1938) path-breaking essay on the person, it has

been anthropology’s emphasis on jurisprudence, philosophy and theology on

its accounts of the “West” that has consolidated a dichotomous depiction ac-

cording to which “we” are autonomous individuals, while “they”, enmeshed

in webs of kinship, are “joined-up” and relational. An alternative focus – on

kinship, for instance – would bring to the fore how much we ourselves are re-

lational as well.

Images of personhood, cherished by different polities, become political

tools. Thus, there may be political agendas underpinning someone’s depic-

tion as “mother or son of the Uprising” or as “individual man and woman in

families”. In the latter case, perhaps with the veiled objective of transfering

to families responsibilities that the State itself – or what remains of it –no

longer wants to assume.

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Gustavo Baptista Barbosa is a journalist and anthropologist. He received

his first MSc in Social Anthropology from PPGAS/Museu Nacional/UFRJ in

2002, with the thesis ‘A Socialidade contra o Estado: a Antropologia de Pierre

Clastres’, which proposed that it is possible to identify, in Clastres’ books, ex-

amples of how the ‘objectivity’ of ‘socialities’ works through the ‘subjectiv-

ity’ of ‘persons-in-interaction’ and vice-versa. In 2006, he obtained his MSc in

Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with

the dissertation ‘Back to the House: Becoming a Man in the First Palestinian

Intifada’. He is presently a PhD Candidate at the Department of Anthropology

of the London School of Economics and is conducting fieldwork on gender

and agency among young men from the Shatila Refugee Camp, in the south-

ern suburbs of Beirut. He has published, among others, ‘A Socialidade con-

tra o Estado: a Antropologia de Pierre Clastres’. 2005. Revista Brasileira de

Antropologia 47 (2): 529-576 (also available on-line: http://www.scielo.br/scie-

lo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-77012004000200006) e ‘O Personalismo

em Gilberto Freyre e Sérgio Buarque de Holanda e o Clientelismo como

Negação da Política’. 1994. Cadernos do IPRI (15): 53-65.

E-mail: [email protected]

Back to the House: Becoming a Man in the First Palestinian Intifada

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